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Monday, September 23, 2013

The Architect of School Reform Who Turned Against It

It was the early 1990s when I first began
to engage in serious scholarship. Chapter Two of my doctoral research led me inevitably
to Lawrence Cremin and his two best proteges - Ellen Condiliffe Lagemann and Diane Ravitch.

But in her 2000 volume Left Back, Ravitch threw a knuckle ball, down and away. Left Back rebuked the lingering progressive efforts of the 60s and 70s and outlined a new vision of questionable efforts that would supposedly refocus American schools on student achievement. In Left Back she warned that "anything in education that is labeled a 'movement' should be avoided like the plague." Then she helped launch the corporate education reform movement.

Rather than chase the pitch, I watched it go by and spent the next decade wondering where in the heck Ravitch had gotten off to. At some point, I learned that she was at the decidedly conservative and politically active Hoover Institute and might have written her off completely except that her writings remained some of the best researched and documented that I encountered.

Following her epic reversal of opinion on corporate education reform
accompanied by her all out assault on the purveyors of "privatization" I should embrace the prodigal Ravitch, who now remembers that teachers are in the people business. Yet, I find that I still harbor resentments.When I think about the deamonization of teachers, which is still being done under the guise of school reform, along with the underfunding of the entire enterprise, I find it a more natural response to blame - when perhaps I should embrace. I'll have to take that up with my therapist.

In the meantime, Reign of Error is proving to be the "must-read" whistleblower's tale of the year, the kind that stays on your shelf for reference.

The survival of the school-reform
movement, as it’s known to champions and detractors alike, is no longer
assured. Even a couple years ago, few would have predicted this turn of
events for a crusade that began with the publication of A Nation at Risk
in 1983, gathered momentum as charter schools and Teach for America
took off in the 1990s, and surged into the spotlight with No Child Left
Behind in 2001. As a schoolteacher, I know I didn’t anticipate this
altered landscape. If one person can be credited—or blamed—for the
reform movement’s sudden vulnerability, it’s a fiercely articulate
historian, now in her 70s, named Diane Ravitch.

That Ravitch helped conceive the movement she now condemns makes her
current role even more unexpected. Almost four decades ago, Ravitch
emerged as a preeminent chronicler of, as she put it, “the rise and fall
of grand ideas” in American education. The author of 11 books,
including Reign of Error (out this month), she has traced the past century’s successive battles over how best to deliver a quality education—and to whom.

In 1991, she shifted from observer to policy adviser, becoming an
assistant secretary of education under George H. W. Bush. An outspoken
critic of progressive pedagogical theories, she urged rigorous national
standards and gravitated toward conservatives promoting parental choice,
vouchers, and charter schools. Market-based alternatives, she decided,
were the answer for impoverished parents desperate to see their children
escape broken inner-city schools.

A decade later, No Child Left Behind’s bipartisan push for federally
mandated assessments brought Ravitch’s favored prescriptions into the
mainstream. A growing cadre of social entrepreneurs—including Teach for
America’s founder, Wendy Kopp, and many former TFAers, among them the
creators of the KIPP charter
schools—focused more intently on improving teacher quality. This was the
key, they argued, to boosting achievement among disadvantaged students.
They attracted generous backers, not least the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation.

Executives from Silicon Valley and Wall Street hedge funds joined the
cause, financing new organizations, such as Democrats for Education
Reform, to push for more innovation. Soon the movement commanded
allegiance from Democrats and Republicans in Congress, secretaries of
education from both parties, and several big-city mayors and school
superintendents. Ravitch, for her part, briefly advised George W. Bush’s
first presidential campaign. The only figures conspicuously absent from
this burgeoning coalition seemed to be traditional teachers and their
unions, whom many reformers judged a primary obstacle to necessary
change.

President Obama embraced his predecessor’s policies with, if
anything, greater gusto. His Race to the Top initiative, employing
federal stimulus money, encouraged states to open more charter schools,
use student test scores to assess teacher quality, and dismantle tenure.
The revolution appeared nearly complete. Except that by 2010, Diane
Ravitch had broken ranks.

That year, she published a carefully researched book in which she
reflected on the movement she’d helped launch but could no longer
support. Surveying the data, she concluded that the reform effort was
just another in the parade of high hopes that policy makers and
practitioners had promoted through the decades. Their strategies
couldn’t transform schools into engines of social mobility, because they
did little to address the underlying causes of the achievement gap
between white and minority students: entrenched segregation and poverty
in America’s urban core. The book was called The Death and Life of the Great American School System, but it might as well have been called The Corrections.

The evidence Ravitch marshaled was damning. Some charters were
superb, but most were not outperforming traditional public schools.
Recalcitrant teachers unions weren’t a chief cause of failing schools
after all; plenty of charters, freed from union strictures, were
foundering. Nor had No Child Left Behind generated a substantial rise in
student achievement. Now that standardized-test scores determined
schools’ fates and funding, the curriculum in many districts emphasized
rote prep. Benchmarks got revised downward. Even a few of Ravitch’s
conservative former colleagues conceded that she was essentially right
on the facts.

A former compatriot, Ravitch was perfectly poised to lead the
mid-course correction the reform movement acutely needed. Who better to
ask the tough questions and propose the necessary adjustments before
another wild pendulum swing exhausted the public’s patience for
innovation, as Ravitch the historian had warned happens again and again?
She challenged reformers’ alarmist narrative about an entire
public-school system in sharp decline, noting that affluent American
students were doing just fine. But the most-impoverished students were
more socially isolated than ever.

Ravitch and her book instead further polarized an already strident
debate. Movement crusaders denounced her as a doomsayer with no
constructive answers. Although the reformist camp was more diverse than
Ravitch acknowledged, its more hard-line proponents circled the wagons.
They declined to scrutinize even the obvious excesses of their movement:
the zealotry of D.C.’s superintendent of schools, Michelle Rhee, who
soon found herself linked to a cheating scandal; the shady for-profit
charters and so-called cyber schools with no record of serving
disadvantaged children; the hastily adopted and unproven
teacher-assessment schemes; a pricey new bureaucracy of McKinsey-style
reform consultants, deployed even as classroom budgets were gutted.

Ravitch had taken to social media with the fervor of a teenager, and
she responded to critics with fire-hose blasts of tweets and blog posts.
Plainly thrilling to the role of polemicist, she accused one
“loathsome” reformer of having “ruined the life” of a career educator
“for filthy lucre.” Her opponents gave as good as they got. Whitney
Tilson, a financier renowned for circulating pro-reform e‑mails,
denounced Ravitch’s “thuggery.”

Ravitch was no longer engaging with her critics. She was rallying a
base that grew rapidly as anti-testing fervor spread. This spring, she
helped found the Network for Public Education to fight high-stakes
testing and what she calls the privatization of public schools.
(Meanwhile, Ravitch’s ideological adversaries have poured money into
school-board and congressional races.) In less than three years, she has
become the public face of a counterrevolution that shows no signs of
abating, as many educators and parents now balk at the Common Core State
Standards, a newly ambitious set of academic guidelines and
accompanying assessments.

Ravitch presents Reign of Error as an overture to dialogue with opponents, but her subtitle suggests otherwise: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.
Her tour of the research is littered with bumper-sticker slogans—she
indicts, for example, the “Walmartization of American education”—likely
to put off the unconverted. The book reads like a campaign manual
against “corporate reformers.” The first half challenges the claims of
their movement; the second offers Ravitch’s alternative agenda. Her
prescriptions include universal pre-K, smaller class sizes, better
teacher training, and more measures to reduce poverty and school
segregation.

These are worthy goals—and not one of them is necessarily
incompatible with many reformers’ own aims. Yet Ravitch doesn’t address
competing priorities or painful trade-offs. Further reducing class size
in better-off suburban districts, for example, may leave less money for
more urgently needed early-childhood programs in poorer communities.

Ravitch the counterrevolutionary may be right that the reformers’
cause is primed for derailment. But Ravitch the historian once foretold
what typically follows a contentious drive for school improvement: “It
was usually replaced,” she observed in 2003, “by a movement called ‘back
to basics,’ or ‘essentialism,’ ” which didn’t herald new progress but
rather “a backlash against failed fads.” Ravitch herself is the
“essentialist” now, urging that we go back not to basics but to a past
when issues of equity and adequate funding dominated debates about
education. At a time of growing income inequality, this correction is
overdue.

But let’s not get too nostalgic about those old debates. There’s a
reason the younger Ravitch was impatient decades ago to discover new
choices for families in America’s worst-off districts. I hope I’m not
alone in searching her new book for traces of the writer who, as
recently as 2010, could still see beyond a politicized landscape to
understand what draws many hard-pressed parents to charters. They’re not
set on this curriculum or that pedagogy, as some reformers suggest.
They’re looking, as Ravitch appreciated, for academic “havens”—which is
what parents at the inner-city school where I teach, once nominally
parochial and now a charter, often tell me. They want a place where
their children can join peers already driven to achieve in school—a
search with another bleak trade-off. The departure of these students
leaves other peers, without parents resourceful enough to find better
alternatives, stranded in schools that become all the harder to improve.

In Reign of Error, Ravitch does outline the beginnings of a
potential compromise with her former pro-charter allies, which she isn’t
trumpeting on Twitter, but should be. Instead of trying to eliminate
charters altogether, she sounds ready to work toward making them better.
Some of the greatest failures and outright frauds of the charter
movement, she rightly observes, are in its for-profit sector. Schools
shouldn’t be in the business of figuring out how to maximize investor
returns—in fact, they shouldn’t be in business at all. No top private or
parochial school operates this way. Ravitch is less persuasive when she
attacks charter networks. Why not scale up programs that work? Some of
the best charters, like KIPP, are chains run by nonprofits.

If the reform movement hopes to retain the public’s trust, insisting
that reputable charters expel their for-profit brethren is a sensible
place to start. Ravitch also argues convincingly that charters should
accept a fairer share of the toughest-to-educate students. For her part,
Ravitch might lead her own followers to recognize that the desire to
improve teacher quality isn’t tantamount to teacher-bashing.

“If my child were in a school where he was not learning,” Ravitch
wrote in the not-too-distant past, “I would not wait for a gathering of
social scientists to tell me whether it was okay for me to put him in
another school.” A reform movement convulsed by extremism shouldn’t
hinder parents, or children, either. If only Ravitch, too, would
dedicate her zeal to a less divisive vision.

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KSN&C is intended to be a place for well-reasoned civil discourse...not to suggest that we don’t appreciate the witty retort or pithy observation. Have at it. But we do not invite the anonymous flaming too often found in social media these days. This is a destination for folks to state your name and speak your piece.

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On KSN&C, all authors are responsible for their own comments. See full disclaimer at the bottom of the page.

Why This Blog?

So far as we know, we only get one lifetime. So, when I "retired" in 2004, after 31-years in public education I wanted to do something different. I wanted to teach, write and become a student again. I have since spent a decade in higher ed.

I have listened to so many commentaries over the years about what should be done to improve Kentucky's schools - written largely by folks who have never tried to manage a classroom, run a school, or close an achievement gap. I came to believe that I might have something to offer.

I moved, in 1985, from suburban northern Kentucky to what was then the state’s flagship district - Fayette County. I have had a unique set of experiences to accompany my journey through KERA’s implementation. I have seen children grow to graduate and lead successful lives. I have seen them go to jail and I have seen them die. I have been amazed by brilliant teachers, dismayed by impassive bureaucrats, disappointed by politicians and uplifted by some of Kentucky’s finest school children. When I am not complaining about it, I will attest that public school administration is critically important work.

Democracy is run by those who show up. In our system of government every citizen has a voice, but only if they choose to use it.

This blog is totally independent; not supported or sponsored by any institution or political organization. I will make every effort to fully cite (or link to) my sources. Please address any concerns to the author.

On the campaign trail...with my wife Rita

An action shot: The Principal...as a much younger man.

Faculty Senate Chair

Serving as Mace Bearer during the Inauguration of Michael T. Benson as EKU's 12th president.

Teaching

EDF 203 in EKU's one-room schoolhouse.

Professin'

Lecturing on the history of Berea College to Berea faculty and staff, 2014.

Faculty Regent

One in a long series of meetings. 2016

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